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Comment by vhantz | Hacker News Reader

Building up strawmen against LLMs will only make the hypers look more reasonable. A language model responds to inouts exactly as a model of anything else would. That is enough to explain all the "intelligence" without believing a model is somehow a "new kind of mind". Those who think LLMs are intelligent don't know enough about models. And those who think they are useless don't know enough about models.

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Anyone that thinks that they know anything about intelligent needs to realize they don't know shit about intelligence.

Ever since people started talking LLMs possibly being AGI I realized I didn't know what the intelligence part really meant at a more fundamental level. This lead me to realize almost anyone when anyone says intelligence on the internet they really mean

"Intelligence is like porn, I'll know it when I see it".

Anyone who thinks LLMs are intelligent is either dumber than you, or has way more knowledge on the subject than you.

Michael Levin has a good body of work on biological intelligent at small scales that can really change one's views on this.

I think LLMs are intelligent. What don’t I understand about them that would make me change my mind? Keeping in mind that for me “intelligence” is the ability to solve complicated, intellectually demanding problems, and to understand novel concepts.

To all commenters who think LLMs are intelligent and comparable to themselves, you don't need me to change your mind. I believe you.

Sorry but are you trying to subtly imply that if I think LLMs are intelligent, I’m probably actually just a bit stupid?

Because I would be more than happy to go head to head with you on academic and professional pedigree and credentials.

I notice you also ignore my comment that you seem to be replying to and instead post your response here. But did you have any answer to the question I asked?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49776482

would this imply llms aren't intelligent because they have no academic or professional pedigree or credentials? :P

Oh no I meant to compare myself to the person I am talking to, because I believe my credentials and pedigree ought to convince them that I am a pretty smart guy and so the argument “if you think LLMs are intelligent then you’re dumb” doesn’t ring true for me.

Your credentials and pedigree seem to be "Self taught @ Meta"

You don't need to prove to me that your intelligence is comparable to LLMs. I believe you.

Yeah you already tried that one.

You’re hiding behind implications because your actual argument doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.

You have yet to respond to either of the points I made. Zero intellectual conviction or courage!

Yeah, his posting history isn't promising. He's been doing the "if you think you're as smart as an LLM, you're probably right" argument for a month now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49315846

I don't think you're gonna get much out of going back and forth here.

For what it's worth, I disagree with you that they're intelligent, but my conviction is fairly low. I don't understand intelligence as well as I would like, and it could well be that we are on our way. One of my theories is that our brains are made up of several modules, each of which is something like an LLM trained on a particular type of data, but I'm not a neuroscientist, just an interested observer.

LOL! Very sad.

And of course there is a lot of ambiguity and unknown here. But this guy I don’t think has the capacity to deal with that kind of subtlety.

So once we have online learning in LLMs, what do you think you will have that makes you intelligent but not LLMs? Better learning efficiency? That will be improved as well.

I think we need to start moving on from the term LLMs because it clearly confuses people since they started modelling more than just language.

What else are they modeling?

You realise tokens are just data and data can represent anything.

Still, large language models model language.

Almost all of the latest models are MLLMs (multimodal large language models). For exmaple, [1] evaluates GPT-6 Astra on vision tasks.

[1] https://blog.roboflow.com/gpt-6-astra-vision/

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